A Little Blog Research on Photo Books – Which Photo Book Website to use?

Dec 08 2008

iPhoto Photo-Book
Image by otzberg via Flickr

With Christmas just 2.5 weeks away it is time to get serious about holiday shopping.  What do you get for the people that have everything and ask for nothing?  I have been thinking about the photo books for a few months now.  I saw one of the Apple Iphoto books over the summer and I was pretty impressed.  I am on the email list for MyPublisher and I was about to start there to create a book but I thought I would see who else is out there.  Here are some of the websites and reviews that I have found.  I hope that this post will not only help you find a photo book printer but also demonstrate how you can use searching and blogs to further research a topic.

Coincidentally the December issue of Ready Made that I was flipping through has a little round up of photo book printers.  This issue isn’t online yet but here are the sites they suggest…

But who has the best quality for the price?  My first couple of google searches turned up a bunch of reviews from the past few years.  PhotobookStory.com has some detailed info but they don’t offer reviews on all of the photo book sites, plus it looks like this site was created a few years ago because they still have a guestbook.

Make-Your-Own-Photobooks.com has lots of info but it looks like it is more about ad revenue than photo book reviews – there is no info about a person behind it and the site name is very generic.

My next thought was to check to see if Lifehacker had any posts on photo books but there were only a few posts that were over 2 years old.  This post was recommended by another blog, but it is from 2006 – some of the sites mentioned here don’t even have the same name today.  This website has a review does a great job of comparing Lulu, Blurb and MyPublisher  with some nice pictures of the print quality.  But it is dated December 2007.   I know that the technology on this printing changes quite quickly so I wanted to find some posts from this year.

I then found a review for a site called Albelli on the blog Photodoto.   While there are some ads on Photodoto, I could tell from the other posts that this blog was one persons opinions (he also has a great about page) – I also liked the catchy name and the tag line “Photography is for everyone.”  The review of Albelli was helpful – I learned that no one was happy with their books. But it was the comments section that was the most helpful – I learned about 3 other photo books sites I had not seen before.

Each of these sites were recommended by someone that had already used the site.   I then followed up on a few of these.  I wanted to see if anyone was comparing Viovio or Colormailer to some of the more popular sites.

One of the next sites I found was Photo-Book-Review.toptenreviews.com.   This was helpful to see a ranking of these sites but this site also seemed a bit generic.  So at this point I was thinking about trying VioVio, MyPublisher or Apples Iphoto.

I came across some other more recent blog posts that helped me to narrow down my choices:

  • Baby Cheap Skate – I thought this would be a good site to check for a cost comparison rather than professional qaulity reviews.
  • PhotoWalkPro – a photographer who had checked out a couple of different photo book sites
  • The Boomer Live – another look at MyPublisher
  • The Digital Celt – A rave review of VioVio

Next I did a google search on blogs that had a link to VioVio.com and found this post on WhipUp.net which is a blog that I have followed in the past.  This is a great post with lots of detail about photo calendars – I even learned about a new site RedBubble and I was impressed that the founder of RedBubble left a comment on the post, it looks like RedBubble just does calendars not books.

Another post I found was on the JPG blog.  JPG is a website, online community and magazine about photos and people that like photos.  While it is possible that VioVio is an advertiser on JPG, I don’t think that JPG would be offering up a discount for a service that they didn’t like.

I also did a search on Flickr and the Flickr forums.  I know from past experience that Flickr has a very active community of users.  No one was talking about VioVio but it was helpful to see what other users had to say.   A search of Flickr turned up a picture of a finished VioVio book and a link to the photographer’s blog,  where he offers a couple of posts on his experiences with some of the photo printing sites.

Now that I have read quite a bit about these photo book sites and seen some pictures of the finished products I am going to try VioVio.com, the price point seems to be the best and I am impressed that I haven’t seen any negative comments about the VioVio photobooks.  I could keep posting links about this but with holiday shipping deadline today I need to start working on the book.

Some related reading…
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  • rachelorans
    I used Ubuildabook and could not be happier. I upgraded to their premium 100# silk paper and designed a full bleed, Hardcover Book with around 100 pages. Since I ordered 25 the cost was about $30.00 a book-this appeared to be the lowest price on the web.

    They have a simple site and under their frequently asked questions I found a link to get my ISBN and Barcode.

    They also publish their ICC Printer Profile -so my color results were very good.

    I would highly recommend them.
  • Hi Linda - Thanks for letting us know about the contest - sounds very interesting - I will be interested in reading the reviews!
    Lindsay
  • It is an interesting question to answer -- who provides the best quality for price? Since everyone seems to have a different opinion of quality it gets even harder to answer when different people have different quality expectations.

    I am the co-owner of one of the review sites that you mentioned. Make Your Own Photobooks has reviewed over 30 different photo book publishers on the same software features. But, we haven't been able to capture the quality of each photo book. To do this we are starting a "You Be The Reviewer" sweepstakes from April 1-April 30 where people get an entry for reviewing a photo book they have made -- this includes their quality perceptions too. We will be giving away three separate photo books. Details and entries are at http://www.make-your-own-photobooks.com/photo-b.... We would love to have your review of the book you made.
  • admin
    Thanks for the links - the information is very helpful. What none of these sites mention is that it takes a lot of time to pick out the photos and place them on the pages and add text and themes. The layout of the pages took much longer than I thought it would.
  • MJT
    I'm also in the process of selecting a photobook publisher, and have done some online research. You are right on about many reviews were dated, and the opinions vary dramatically. That is because these reviewers seldom provided some context to back up their comments, such as: the type of photos, the intents of publishing, the pricing vs quality priorities, etc.

    Here are a few links that you may find interesting:

    http://www.naturephotographers.net/articles0405...

    http://www.daepublishing.com/pod/PODExposed.html

    http://beckermanphoto.com/print-on-demand-for-b...

    There is scarse information on how to get an ISDN and sell a POD book at Amazon, etc., such as this:

    http://www.workboxers.com/2008/03/28/deal-break...
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